Beer and Nietzsche
by Romana Dante
Summary: It's 1996 and Billy is finally 18. His college roommate drags him out to a bar, where an encounter with a random stranger leads him to examine his views on villainy.


"Hey Buddy, wanna go get wasted?"

Billy looked up from his book and glared at his roommate. It was 1996, he was 18 years old and a senior in college. He spent the previous three years too young to do anything, a fact he had been readily using to advantage. Unfortunately now, he was legally an adult…

"No," he said, somewhat awkwardly, "I'd really rather not."

"Oh come on," whined his roommate, a large 21-year-old named CJ, "it's Friday night! You're finally old enough to get into a club, the bar in the one on Oak street doesn't even card, come out and party!"

"I don't think so," he said, hoping he sounded firm, "I have a lot to do tonight, and I want to get to the end of this book…"

"You spend too much time studying," said CJ, "you've got to go out and meet people, no one likes people who just sit there and read all day."

"I'm not really concerned with being well liked." said Billy.

"Well you should be," said CJ, "you've been here for three years and you've got, like, one friend. It's because you're too smart. No one likes smart people. You shouldn't be smart, it's weird. Come out and be normal for once."

"As much as I would i_love/i_ to be a complete idiot," Billy muttered bitterly under his breath before raising his voice to answer, "I really don't think so. Not tonight. But, um, thanks for the offer."

Two hours later he was busily re-reading his battered copy of i_Jekyll and Hyde/i_ when a large paper bag suddenly covered his head and he felt himself somewhat violently being dragged away.

"What are you doing?!" he shouted through the bag as best he could.

"We're taking you out!" proclaimed CJ, "We're gonna teach you to be normal for once! This is the only way we figured we could do it."

"Thisi _has/i_ to be illegal." Billy muttered, allowing himself to be dragged off-campus to a remote location in what sounded like one of the seedier parts of town. By the time the bag came off and suddenly found himself standing in front of the small, less than impressive looking club, he had almost no idea where he was, or even what city he was in.

His roommate smiled at him, a stupid, yet somehow intimidating grin. "Let's go!" he said.

The room was hot and crowded, people barely aware of their surroundings grinding against each other in the dark. It didn't take long for CJ and his gang to lose themselves in the beat of the music and some Jell-O shots, abandoning Billy by the bar. He bought himself a beer and stood against the counter, waiting for his roommate to get everything out of his system and decide it was time to go home.

"Nothing says humanity like a bunch of drunk people, right?"

Billy jumped, and turned to his right. A young man about CJ's age stood leaning casually against the bar. He was dressed darkly - dark clothes under a black jacket – and seemed remarkably sober compared to the world around him. Like Billy, he held a single, barely touched beer in his hand. "Am I right?" he asked.

"Uh…yeah," said Billy, awkwardly, "I guess, yeah."

"Don't kid me," said the man, "I know you. You were in my intro to Philosophy class freshman year. Professor Cantor, remember?"

"Yeah," said Billy, trying desperately to remember the first semester of his freshman year, "it was really early in the morning, wasn't it? Mondays and Fridays."

"Good times." Said the man, taking a sip of his beer, "I remember you, though. Billy Buddy. You were fourteen years old, and you wrote this paper on Nietzsche, Professor Cantor made you read it out loud."

"I remember that," said Billy, bitterly, "I got beat up for it for weeks. I thought people were beyond that kind of thing in college, where everyone is supposed to be adults. I realized people are people, not matter what their age is."

"Exactly," said the man, "that's the point."

"What is?"

"Of your paper, the cruelty and pointlessness of humanity, people and evil. I remember you reading it and you could tell all those thoughts and ideas didn't just belong to Nietzsche. I mean, some of them did, but a lot of them were yours. You had your own plan for the world when you were fourteen."

"A lot of fourteen year olds have their own plan for the world," said Billy, "everyone's still idealistic enough to think they can actually change things."

"Please," said the man, "you'd already given up being an idealist, you were actually thinking. You knew the world was a mess and rather than just smiling and hoping it was all get better, you were thinking of ways to fix it. Good ways. Radical ways. Ways that might actually do something. You're very smart, Billy."

"Yeah," said Billy, glaring at his beer, "thanks, I know. It's clearly helped me out a lot over the years, you know, being mocked and beat up most of my life. Being smart is really a blessing."

"Your being smart is." The man paused, and looked around the room. The air smelled like alcohol and sweat. Bodies moved together in the dark, creating slow, sensual shadows revealed only by the occasional smoky glow of a single white strobe light. The man sighed. "Have you ever considered villainy, Billy?"

"Uh…" Billy was taken aback. It was true, he'd toyed with the idea when he was a kid, and occasionally when he was feeling particularly angry and bitter as a pre-teen, but it wasn't exactly something you brought up with a complete stranger in a bar. Super villain culture was taboo, it was hidden. It stayed quietly in the shadows, wrapped in scandal and lies and secret plans that no one, not even those in the know, would or could speak about. People didn't discuss it in the open, it just wasn't done.

"I realize it's a strange question to ask in public," said the man, amused, "but it's not like anyone's sober enough to care." He grinned, "Personally, I think the atmosphere suits the conversation well."

Billy grinned back, slightly. He wasn't necessarily at ease, but he was certainly intrigued. The man had an interesting feel to him, and their talk was far more interesting than anything he'd ever discussed with CJ. He took another sip of beer and sighed.

"When I was little I used to want to be a hero," he said, "I wanted the world to be a place where people didn't have to be afraid to go to school in the morning, where good people didn't get beat up for trying to be their best. I thought heroes were protectors, speakers for the small and innocent."

"What changed that?" asked the man.

"Justice Joe," answered Billy, "and Mr. Maniacal. I was there the day Joe was defeated, I had been beat up for being an i_Einstein/i_."

"Ah yes," said the man, rolling his eyes, "Justice Joe's favorite insult."

"No kidding," said Billy, "In a way, I sort of saw my own life re-enacted on that roof. It was a bully and his victim, and it wasn't the villain doing the bullying. It was the strong, stupid hero and the ridiculous, unenlightened society that cheered him on. That was the day everything changed, the day I realized the truth about the world we live in, and wondered why I hadn't seen it before."

"That's a super villain origin if I ever heard one," said the man, "did you act on it at all?"

"No," said Billy, silently wondering why he was bothering to tell a complete stranger his life story, "I wasn't sure I wanted to take it all the way. Plenty of people have done great things without running around in costumes and robbing banks."

"But that's how you get noticed," said the man, putting down his drink and giving Billy his full attention, "the world today is moved by spectacle and intrigue. Look what makes the news. It's not some student with a well researched thesis on what's wrong with society, it's "Bad Horse destroys a federal cooperation" or "Bait and Switch hold entire mall hostage". It's not ideas that get noticed, it's action. Frightening action. We don't live in a world where you can quietly change society from within, you have to tip the balance, make noise. That's why villains do what they do."

"But to do it you have to become truly evil," said Billy, "you have to abandon practically all sense of morality. Doesn't that just worsen the problem? Create more negative influence to bring society closer to chaos?"

"Is chaos really that bad?" asked the man, "We have social order, we have laws, and justice, and structure, and what is it doing?" He gestured around the bar, the crowd now completely inebriated from smoke and alcohol, and who knew what else. "Look around," he said, "does the world really deserve that kind of stability? If humanity so often seeks comfort in escape and stupidity, is all that structure really doing anything?"

"True." Said Billy, quietly. The man was making a frightening amount of sense. Nearly identical ideas had been floating around in his mind most of his life. He'd always been different, thought different, spoke different, interacted different. He had never considered himself a force for good, he'd never been able to. He was just…a force.

"Evil isn't created," he said, "It's just there, it's natural. I'm not…I'm not sure if I have it. I'm not sure if I have what it takes."

"Do you want to have what it takes?" asked the man.

Billy looked around, at the smoky room, at the questionable sexual liaisons in the corner, at the sheer lack of any signs of intelligence, at his intoxicated roommate.

_i"You shouldn't be smart…"/i_

"Yes," he said, "I do. I don't know if I'm evil by nature, I just know I'm not good. I want to be evil, though, really evil. I want to shake the world until it's too dizzy to move again, to force society to change because I told it to. I think…I've always wanted that."

The man smiled. "At last the truth comes out." He reached into his jacket pocked and pulled out a piece of paper. "A bunch of us are meeting up next week to discuss and hang out. It's not a school sanctioned group, so we change location a lot. Here's next week's spot. You should come."

"Thanks," said Billy, accepting the slip of paper, "I'll think it over." He finished off his beer and put the bottle down on the bar. It was probably about time to collect his roommate and try to find his way back to the dorm. He sighed, then turned to the man. "Who are you?" he asked, "Sorry, I never asked your name."

"I'm Adam," he said, "But lately I've been known as Black Poison."

"The one who blew up all those bank vaults?!" asked Billy, slightly shocked.

The man winked. "Hope to see you soon, Billy."

He finished his beer and slowly wandered out of the club. Billy watched him go. He glanced over at his roommate, now lying completely drunk and probably high on the floor. He smiled, a small but pointed smirk. He was glad CJ had dragged him here. He was glad his roommate was unimaginably stupid.

Now everything was different. Now everything changed. He knew what to do, and he finally knew exactly how to do it.

Meeting people _was_ fun.

smallMuse: Billy/Dr. Horrible

Fandom: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Words: 1, 941/small

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End file.
